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I've been waiting twenty years to hear a live performance of Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony, one of the black masterpieces of twentieth-century music. Last night I finally got my chance, courtesy of Valery Gergiev, who has begun what promises to be a gripping four-concert survey of Prokofiev's symphonies and concertos with the London Symphony at Lincoln Center. An almost unbearable tension underpinned the performance: the Londoners played with frenzied concentration, yet Gergiev imposed a coolly controlling hand, allowing little of the rubato that characterized the Second Piano Concerto (with Vladimir Feltsman) before intermission. The coda, with its shattering dissonances separated by silences, had me in a cold sweat. The audience remained eerily quiet as Gergiev held the fermatas beyond what seemed possible. You can get a backstage glimpse of the LSO tour from the orchestra's tour blog, which seems mostly the work of flutist Gareth Davies.

In this week's New Yorker, I write about new productions of Il Trovatore and La Sonnambula at the Met and comment briefly on the company's 125th-anniversary gala. An excerpt:

Nothing in these operas is any more implausible than the events of the average Shakespeare play, or, for that matter, of the average action movie. The difference is that the conventions of the latter are widely accepted these days, so that if, say, Matt Damon rides a unicycle the wrong way down the Autobahn and kills a squad of Uzbek thugs with a package of Twizzlers the audience cheers rather than guffaws.

Drew McManus notes that Emanuel Ax generously waived his fee for his appearance this weekend at the financially troubled Columbus Symphony. "We didn't ask him," Columbus's executive director told the Columbus Dispatch. In the article, Ax continues his skeptical inquiry into the alleged "rule" forbidding applause between movements of a concerto or symphony. On his blog, he wonders why concert audiences behave this way when opera audiences applaud after arias. It's a good question, with no logical answer. The argument that opera is less "serious" than symphonic music won't hold up. Is Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin less serious than his First Piano Concerto? Is Don Giovanni less serious than, well, anything? For more, see my endless 2005 post on the history of concert-hall applause.

Bob Dylan has given an interview about his forthcoming album, Together Through Life, and, in a typically playful, oblique way, he addresses questions of periodization and musical meaning: "Some people preferred my first-period songs. Some, the second. Some,
the Christian period. Some, the post-Columbian. Some, the
Pre-Raphaelite. Some people prefer my songs from the nineties. I see
that my audience now doesn’t particularly care what period the songs are
from. They feel style and substance in a more visceral way and let it
go at that. Images don’t hang anybody up. Like if there’s an astrologer
with a criminal record in one of my songs it’s not going to make
anybody wonder if the human race is doomed.... If there are shadows and flowers and swampy ledges in a
composition, that’s what they are in their essence. There’s no
mystification. That’s one way I can explain it."

A couple of weeks ago I got to hear the new record, which the Columbia label is scheduled to release on April 28. I'm reluctant to say much after a single audition, but to my ears it was no letdown after Dylan's recent trilogy of new material — Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times. In the interview Dylan describes it as a "romantic" album, which seems about right, although this romance clearly has more shadows than flowers in the corners. The songwriting is more straight-ahead than on the previous two albums, which were stuffed — sometimes overstuffed — with verbal imagery. I kept thinking of Hank Williams's spare, chiseled writing, especially on "Life is Hard": "Sun is sinking low / I guess it's time to go / I feel a chilly breeze / In place of memories." (Note: what I heard may not match the finished work.) There's a fantastically chilling, end-of-one's-rope number called "Forgetful Heart," which has this Kafkaesque image: "The door has closed forevermore / If indeed there ever was a door." But the sadness of the scene is lightened by sweet-sounding arrangements (mandolin, accordion, and violin fill out the band) and by flashes of wit ("Down by the river Judge Simpson walking around / Nothing shocks me more than that old clown"). Some up-tempo, old-time rockers also keep the night terrors at bay.

The version I heard ended with the double whammy of "I Feel a Change Coming On" and "It's All Good" — a pair that may cause listeners to detect a political undertow in this seemingly intimate, out-of-time affair. The chorus of the gorgeously lilting, almost Motown-like "I Feel a Change" could be heard as Obamaesque, although with a certain ambiguous regretfulness Dylan adds, "And the fourth part of the day is already gone." (That's apparently a reference to the Book of Nehemiah.) A Dylan album can't end on such a half-hopeful note, of course. On the grimly boogeying "It's All Good," the singer dons a mask of lethal irony, surveying a ransacked social landscape and then adding, after each exhibition of desperation and decay, "It's all good." That smug little phrase has now been destroyed. Dylan's protestations in the latest interview notwithstanding, some people may indeed come away thinking that the human race is doomed, although at least we go out with a crooked smile.

Lot 198 of an upcoming auction at Bonhams, in London, is the manuscript of Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho. In this notorious sequence the strings end up playing a chord consisting of the notes E-flat, E-natural, F, and G-flat. Norma Herrmann, the composer's third wife, has put up for sale a large batch of manuscripts and memorabilia, including letters from Ives, Schoenberg, Vaughan Williams, and various other composers and musicians; a plaintive note from Orson Welles, inquiring about music for King Lear; a letter from Martin Scorsese, accompanying the script of Taxi Driver, Herrmann's final project; and a copy of Bellini's Il pirata with an inscription from Rossini to Chopin. (Via James Lavino.)

Tony Tommasini, in a generally warm review of Pierre Boulez's recent concerts with the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall, describes their rendition of Stravinsky's Pulcinella as "listless" and "stodgy and blurry." I agree. As Tony says, the problem may simply be that Boulez doesn't believe in the music. After all, just a few years ago he declared that Stravinsky "began so well" and then became "an epigone, trying this historical style, then that one." But there's also the matter of the hall. At the reopening concert for Alice Tully Hall, David Robertson led the Juilliard Orchestra in a performance of the Pulcinella suite that was in every way sharper, clearer, and more alive than Chicago's. Robertson is undoubtedly a better conductor for the score, but Tully's crisp acoustics also helped. No wonder three Stravinsky scores were heard during the first week; the dry acoustics match the composer's mature aesthetic to a tee. The debate over Tully is ongoing, with Allan Kozinn leading the prosecution, but I believe that in certain music the hall will be as good as it gets in New York City. Boulez himself might be very happy there.

Back in 2007 I joined the jazz composer-pianist Ethan Iverson for an Evening of Spooky Modern Music at the Paris Bar. The playlist included Milton Babbitt's Semi-Simple Variations, with the composer's jazzy vibe accentuated. Ethan practiced the piece while on the road with his trio, The Bad Plus, and found that his bandmates, Dave King and Reid Anderson, enjoyed playing along. They got the idea of adding modern classical works to the Bad Plus repertory. The new Bad Plus album, For All I Care, includes the Babbitt, an extract from Stravinsky's Apollo, and Ligeti's "Fém" Etude. On his blog Ethan explains the genesis of the project and also the making of the fabulous video above. The dancers are Julie Worden (red), Michelle Yard (blue), and Laurel Lynch (black), from the Mark Morris Dance Group.

Much happens in the brief span of Semi-Simple Variations. Christopher Wintle once wrote a forty-three-page analysis of the piece for Perspectives of New Music — more than one page per measure. But, in fact, it is semi-simple. It's a theme plus five variations. The theme unfolds in six held notes over the first six measures, which take up the first thirteen or so seconds of the video. The work is also, in a way, variations on a rhythmic pattern. The piano begins with a quick little four-note burst. After that, we go through the other fifteen ways you can arrange a set of four units, with a "null set" or rest at the end:

And those rhythmic elements are then juggled according to the same kinds of principles that govern the permutations of notes. Presto, total serialism!

A tempo canon is a canon in which the same music unfolds in several voices at different speeds. The classic example in Renaissance polyphony is the Agnus Dei 2 of Josquin's Missa l'homme armé Super voces musicales (1502), in which the lowest voice moves twice as fast as the middle voice and the top voice moves three times as fast:

Kyle Gann, in his book The Music of Conlon Nancarrow, sets Josquin's Mass side by side with Nancarrow's canonic studies for player piano, written several centuries later. In Study No. 19, the tempos obey the ratio 12/15/20:

Elliott Carter, György Ligeti, Steve Reich, and Arvo Pärt, among many others, have used related principles in their music. In the Kyrie of Ligeti's Requiem, the main subject begins with a drop from B-flat to A-natural, but each voice breaks away from the initial note at a different time. An awesome cloud of sound begins to grow:

Jonathan Nott conducting the Berlin Philharmonic and the London Voices, Teldec 88263.

Pärt's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten consists essentially of descending A-minor scales, with the first violins playing sixteen times faster than the double basses:

All this reminds me of something I perpetrated in college, in collaboration with Michael Pahre — a self-styled radiophonic composition entitled Ecstatic Radio Fantasia on Robert Ashley's "She Was a Visitor". At one point we set up a race among four recordings of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto; as I recall, Richter won. Michael Vazquez was the lead vocalist for the performance, uttering the phrase "She was a visitor" continuously for forty-five minutes (at one point it became "Cher was a Visigoth"). In this segment he was joined by Douglas Wolk, future author of Reading Comics, who, for unknown reasons, read aloud the printed matter on a Nixon in China radio promo. Bright college days! The Ashley work that inspired this silliness can be found at UbuWeb.

An interesting hyper-canon will ensue if you hit all the buttons on this page in quick succession.

The Rest Is Noise is now out in paperback in the British Isles, with a jazzy new cover and a kind blurb from Colin Greenwood of Radiohead. This version includes a new twelve-page supplementary section titled Suggested Listening and Reading. The same material can be found in the latest printing of the paperback in the US; here's a pdf. The American edition has now sold 100,000 copies. Once more I have to express my bewildered gratitude for the unlikely success of this obscure venture. Please don't forget the Audio Guide, containing several hundred musical samples related to the book.

Rebecca Mead's profile of Natalie Dessay appears in this week's New Yorker (online for subscribers). In one scene, Dessay talks to Roland Geyer, the Intendant of the Theater an der Wien, about the possibility of singing in a revival of Falstaff — not the Verdi masterpiece but the 1799 version by Antonio Salieri:

A member of Geyer's staff went backstage and gave Dessay a copy of the Falstaff. During intermission, she paged through it, scanning the staves to see if the role rose to vocal heights sufficient to interest her. . . . "There's nothing to sing here," she said of the Salieri, leafing swiftly through in pursuit of a challenging aria before studying the music in greater detail. On a first pass, at least, she didn't find much. "If I do something without high notes, everyone will say, 'Oh, she doesn't have high notes anymore.' You can do it once, but if you do it again and again they start to talk, and then the reputation is gone."

Dessay sings in La Sonnambula at the Met starting on March 2. I'll review that production and the new Trovatore later in the month.

Alice Tully Hall reopens on Sunday, and Lincoln Center has assembled an impressive lineup of artists for a two-week renovation festival: Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI, the Emerson and Belcea Quartets, violinist Daniel Hope, tenor Mark Padmore, David Robertson and the Juilliard Orchestra (Messiaen's From the Canyons to the Stars, which Tully commissioned), Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic, Philippe Herreweghe and the Collegium Vocale Gent (the Mass in B Minor), Paavo Järvi and the Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (four Beethoven symphonies in one night), a new-music day with ETHEL, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Alarm Will Sound, and Steve Reich and Musicians, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. All tickets are $25, except when they're free.

From p. 143 of the stimulus bill, which the U.S. Congress passed yesterday: "$50,000,000, to be distributed in direct grants to fund arts projects and activities which preserve jobs in the non-profit arts sector threatened by declines in philanthropic and other support during the current economic downturn." An attempt by Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma to eliminate all arts and museum funding from the bill was defeated. Ironically, Sen. Coburn is the father of the outstanding young soprano Sarah Coburn, who has appeared many times at opera houses supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Last year the younger Coburn went home to Oklahoma to sing in Lakmé at the Tulsa Opera — a production made possible in part by a $15,000 grant from the NEA.